Despite all the doom and gloom–and gun control groups’ reports of hundreds of mass shootings each year–the FBI lists four mass school shootings since April 20, 1999, which was the date of Columbine.
Columbine was a gun-free zone in which a 17-year-old and 18-year-old shot and killed 13 defenseless individuals, then killed themselves. Twenty additional innocents were wounded as the two attackers fired their guns in a gun-free zone.
Since that attack, Newsweeek reports that the FBI lists four others that qualify as mass school shootings.
- The first of those four was Red Lake Senior High School, where seven people were shot and killed on March 21, 2005. Prior to killing the seven, the 16-year-old attacker killed his grandfather an d his grandfather’s girlfriend.
- The second of the four mass school shootings was at West Nickel Mines Amish School on October 2, 2006. A truck driver entered the school, ordered all males to live the building, then shot and killed four female students before killing himself.
- The third of the mass school shootings was at Sandy Hook Elementary on December 14, 2012. There, a 20-year-old attacker stole guns from his mother then shot and killed her while she slept. He then drove to Sandy Hook and killed 20 students and six teachers/staff. A review of the attack given to Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy (D) showed the armed attacker was in the gun-free school over nine minutes before he faced any armed response.
- The four of the mass school shootings was Marysville-Pilchuck High School on October 24, 2014. In that incident a 15-year-old boy shot five students sitting at a table in the school, killing four. He then killed himself.
All four of these attacks are tragedies that no doubt caused severe heartache for the families of the innocents who were lost. Moreover, all four of the incidents were heinous crimes that involved the violation of numerous gun regulations and anti-gun policies that are already ensconced as laws and statutes. With that said, it is important to note how the left tries its hardest to swell the four mass school shootings into hundreds. In fact, the left’s reporting on mass shootings in general got so out of control in 2015 that Mother Jones editor Mark Follman called them out over it.
On December 3, 2015–the day after the heinous terror attack in San Benardino, California, Follman used a New York Times column to explain:
At Mother Jones, where I work as an editor, we have complied an in-depth open-source database covering more than three decades of public mass shootings. By our measure, there have been four “mass shootings” this year, including the one in San Bernardino, and at least 73 such attacks since 1982.
The important point to understand is that Follman was counting 73 mass attacks in any setting–school or otherwise–over a 43-year period, while the left was claiming 355 mass shootings for 2015 alone. Follman was sending a signal; he was telling leftists that they were losing all credibility because the FBI’s measure for a mass shooting is four fatalities in one incident. That is the measure. And when it is applied and the observer looks at mass school shootings alone, the total number of such incidents since April 20, 1999, is four.
AWR Hawkins is the Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and host of Bullets with AWR Hawkins, a Breitbart News podcast. He is also the political analyst for Armed American Radio. Follow him on Twitter: @AWRHawkins. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.